I have always felt I had a novel in me from an early age however, time was never on my side. As a youngster I would spin off from the top of my head stories to my younger cousins, all of us huddled in the bedroom as our parents enjoyed some free time to themselves knowing we were all safe close-by. In the summer of 1968, I left school aged 15 without any academic qualifications to take up the engineering apprenticeship with British Rail Engineering Ltd. at their Glasgow workshops. More study followed but this time I knuckled down and reached the dizzy heights of a City & Guilds Distinction, I can’t say who was more surprised, my parents or myself. From this point on my life consisted of work, work and more work and free time was in extremely short supply especially when I made the move to self-employment as the normal 40-hour week expanded to 60 or 70. Throughout the first 25 or so years of work I maintained my interest in all matters relating to railways in the UK. I had no inkling to write anything other than the odd railway related article for publication in various monthly magazines. My articles always caused me to search for accurate information on locomotives and their depots and from the many searches I decided to collate the 'as reported' 20,000+ locomotive transfers and withdrawal dates between 1948 and 1968 entitled: ‘ULTIMATE ALLOCATIONS’ which remains available to download.* ​ That is until I had the dream.